


Filling Tumblr's "rebelcaptainprompts" (the drabble-puddle)

by RapidashPatronus



Series: RC Prompts and Drabbles [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/M, Rebelcaptain - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-05-20
Packaged: 2018-10-03 07:08:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10238663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RapidashPatronus/pseuds/RapidashPatronus
Summary: This is my place for the Bits written in response to the fabulous rebelcaptainprompts on Tumblr.





	1. Just give in

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For rebelcaptainprompts Prompt #6 - Temptation (10 March 2017)  
> I do hope you will forgive the somewhat heretical use of the Lord's Prayer as some sort of reference here.

Jyn was conscious of hands gripping her roughly beneath her arms, bearing her up in some sort of shambling march down the corridor. Then the hands were thrusting her forward, sprawling, and there was impact – the cold floor against her cheek, against the skin of her hands. A vicious hiss behind her, and the cell door sealed once more. Her own weight pressed her chest too heavily against the hard surface, but she couldn’t move – didn’t even think of moving. At last, mercifully, consciousness blinked out.

 

Light permeated, and pain. She couldn’t hazard a guess at how long she had lain there. The floor beneath her cheek had warmed, sticky with a small spread of blood. That explained the taste in her mouth. Somehow, she managed to push herself up – the pressure on her hands felt like she weighed the same as eight of her.

_Where is the rebel base?_

She’d lost count of how many times they’d been through this now. The sessions seemed endless, but she knew her responsiveness was failing earlier each time. Her endurance was growing ever weaker. One day, she was pretty sure, they wouldn’t call it off in time. Hopefully one day soon.

She shuffled backward to lean her back against the wall, peeling a matted lock of hair away from her cheek. Not for the first time, she thought about just giving them what they wanted.

It wasn’t her fight, after all. It never had been. She’d done what she did for her father’s sake alone, and because there was nothing else to do. The label of hero had been a heavy one to wear, always knowing underneath that she was not.

It wasn’t her fight to protect.  She could just tell them, and go. Whatever they did to her, that temptation was the thing that hurt the most. The knowledge that she _wanted_ to tell them. The knowledge that, in another life, she would have done. _Not a problem if you don’t look up._

But then she’d looked up, and seen Cassian, and that had been that. And if she owed anything to anybody, she owed it to him, to his passion and loyalty and belief. In the Cause. In _her_. It wasn’t her fight. She was a custodian of his faith and it wasn’t her fight to lose.

 

Later, much later, as his tender hands on her back rubbed oil into the scars, she understood how she had resisted for so long. She, too, had faith in something: he was always her deliverance.


	2. Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for the Rebelcaptainprompts Prompt #4: One Bed... reinterpreted slightly

 

These are some of the places that Jyn has slept:

A soft, white, clean-edged cot on Coruscant. MacVee would make sure she turned out the light when The Octave Stairway finished, and she would yawn and wonder when Papa would come home before sleep took her, and sometimes she dreamed of adventures where her toys came to life.

The cave in the hills. Not the time when Saw found her – she didn’t sleep at all then – but one of the practice runs. A game, Mama said. See how fast you can get there. See if you can stay all night. It was dark and wet and scary, but eventually she had managed to sleep. She won the game, Mama said.

Scratchy and thin, the bottom bunk in Saw’s training camp. Four years later, as she grew in all directions, she learned always to choose the top, where possible.

Under the table in somebody’s kitchen on a rainy night. They’d left the window open and there was food. She woke and left before dawn.

A brown room above a cantina with a boy who finished quickly and passed out heavily. Retribution came in the form of breakfast and a lunch to go before she left, leaving him to wake to a hangover and the bill.

A hard cot in a cell in Wobani’s labour camp. Sleeping didn’t happen much, in favour of survival.

 

Wobani, she believes, is the last place she will ever sleep.

 

* * *

 

 

These are some of the places that Cassian has slept:

A simple, colourful bed built way up near the ceiling in his family’s house. He loved, in particular, the bright patterns on the blanket his abuelita had made for him when he was born. He had learnt all of the animals and pointed to them one by one each night, telling her the names he had given them, as she nodded and smiled.

The oily floor of a cargo hold. He wasn’t quite sure what had gone wrong but at some point he’d ended up with a blaster bolt in his arm and a nasty gash on his head. When he woke up, the bandages were already in place, but there was nowhere softer to lie and a long flight ahead.

Sleeping places in Alliance outposts were all much the same. Different shapes, yes, different sizes, different temperatures, different hours of darkness, different numbers of occupants, all of that. But something about the minimalism in each spoke of a jaded optimism that sat low in his mind like the voice of a lost friend.

The opulent bedroom of a pleasant, if patronising, aristocratic lady with useful connections. He let her adopt him as an exotic pet; she dressed him up, fed him fine food and showed him off to her important friends, who giggled indulgently as he feigned difficulty with idioms. When the time inevitably came that she felt he owed her something in return, he made the most of the moment and tried not to dwell on it afterward.

A soft, white, clean-edged bed in an Imperial base. The sour smell of his stolen uniform hanging beside him kept him awake for most of the night, but it was important to sleep before what the next day held.

 

He fights for a future he doubts exists, where he will only need one bed for the rest of his life. When he dares to imagine it, he imagines it alone, until he meets Jyn.

 

* * *

 

 

In a quiet garden in the centre of the galaxy, one of many plaques details one of many moments, lists some of many names. Below the plaque, the little flowerbed is kept tidy, and the flowers, at least, are always close together.


	3. Desperation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For rebelcaptainprompts Prompt #13 - Desperation (19 May 2017)

**_> I love you I’m so sorry_ **

The message glows glacier-blue on Jyn’s screen and she almost drops it. There’s a silence, and she realises the briefing has stopped. She looks up. Everyone is watching her.

“Is everything alright, Erso?”

She’s shaking. She knows she must look paler still than the pallor of the room casts her.

“Erso?”

Somehow, words find their way from her. “I need to go.”

She doesn’t wait for authorisation or assent. She’s up from her seat and out of the door, typing as she goes.

**_Where are you? I love you too. What’s going on? <_ **

She’s never walked so fast in her life. She’s flying down the corridor, turning corners unseeing, unconscious of her route, just staring at her screen.  _ Answer me, Cassian, please. Don’t do this again. You promised me.  _ Nothing.

**_please let me know you’re alright I love you so much <_ **

And she’s back in their room, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring. Keeping the screen lit. Willing another message to appear. And nothing.

**_where are you let me get someone to you cassian please <_ **

And nothing, nothing. She doesn’t cry, because she won’t, because of what it means if she does. And it’s too long, with her heart raging at its cage, and her vision spreading into two and merging over and over, and the screen that keeps winking out like a little blue life, and she sits, shaking, and staring, and hoping. And hours, and she doesn’t move, and nothing, nothing, nothing.

 

Slam: the sound of something hard and soft against the door, and she cries out as she throws the pad aside and runs to the door, sagging, relief and dread like a drug in her blood.

Gods, the weight of him, the wonderful, alive weight of him.

“I’m so sorry, Jyn.” His choking voice on her shoulder is bassy and muffled as she staggers to hold him up. His weight on her arms and body feels stretched and turbulent, like a jump to hyperspace, like terrible news, and he wears the smell of alcohol like a coat, and she hardly saw his face but she’s seen him look better half dead.

“Come on, come on,” she says, pulling him into the room and letting the door slide shut. He’s too much: it’s all she can do to steer him as he swings sideways and around. He lolls and stumble over unseen chaos, and it takes all she’s got but at last they’re mostly on the bed, feet knocking against each other and the floor. She untangles herself and pushes away to look at him.

How he reached their door she will never know. Face half pressed against the covers, he’s a piteous, soaking disaster, crumpled and wild, and this must be why he never drinks; how many times was he like this in the life she doesn’t ask him about?

He grabs hazily at the air near her arm, and she takes his hand, swallowing hard, steadying her breathing. The sound of his sobbing, slurred apology rolls on and on.

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” she says over it, over and over. “It’s alright.”

There’s no point trying to manoeuvre him beyond lying straight, lifting his legs and swinging them round. She manages somehow to extract him from his shirt – gods, his shirt, he’s been sick – and still he mumbles on, while she says, “it’s alright, it’s alright,” until his clumsy grip on her hand loosens and he sinks into unconsciousness.

So she leans over him and grabs the other half of the counterpane on which he lies, folding it back across him. And she reaches behind her, finding the trashcan under their desk, and tips out the snack bar wrappers onto the floor. And then she sits, and she watches as fear and confusion fly incomprehensibly over his creased, peaceless, sleeping face.

He’s here, and he's alive, and it’s alright now to cry.

 

It’s hours later when he wakes up; she’s ready with the trash can. Rubbing his back in heavy reassurance, the ridges of his spine chase back and forth under his skin, under her hand. His hair curls damply on his neck and she loves him so much that it hurts.

She has water for him when he’s done.

“I’m so sorry,” he says again, still slurred and hoarse.

“You scared me,” she says, her hand still pushing gently back and forth between his shoulders. “I thought –”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s alright, it’s alright.”

And it is, or it will be; whatever it is, it will be.

He shivers and finishes his water, then stares across the room foggily.

She waits. Whatever it is, she’ll be ready.

“They’re building another one.”

She wasn’t ready. But the way his head sinks and his spine sticks out under her hand again and his hands go to his face are enough to push it down. She gathers him in and holds him still, her lips to the top of his head.

“It’s alright,” she says again. “It’s alright.”

She feels him change in her arms, still drunk and blurry, but steadier and more solid. Hope is never lost for long, with Cassian.

“Yeah,” he mumbles. “Yeah, I know.”

 

The next time he wakes, she’s with him, and his head should be an inferno but he feels the skin of her back against his chest, and she’s warm in his arms, and he loves her so much that nothing hurts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This arose in part from a conversation with Yavemiel in which she mentioned a truly vile and ugly lyric she'd heard about holding someone's hair back while they were sick when drunk. It struck as both as wholly unromantic, and so I cruelly challenged her to write fluff based on the line. Unbelievably (or perhaps not, given her talent) she managed not only to do so, but to do so SUPERBLY. Go read it here: "Morning After": http://archiveofourown.org/works/10886817
> 
> But I, being me, got the notion to write angst.


End file.
